Topics: Internet Law - 2070 results

Betsy Kim, editorial director of Lawyers.com, provides today’s Newsbreak, a legal update for entrepreneurs. Small businesses may have a better chance of throwing patent troll under the bridge. Patent trolls are people or companies that buy and enforce patent rights, collecting licensing fees from businesses using a patented technology. The Government Accountability Office recently came out with a report that patent trolls are abusing the system and hurting the economy. There has been a 31% increase in patent …

The beauty of Wikipedia is that anybody can edit the online encyclopedia’s pages. The danger of Wikipedia is the same. By crowd-sourcing its editing functions, the website subjects the accuracy of its content to the scrutiny of the masses. Unfortunately that means that those with more nefarious motives are also free to change pages to their hearts’ content, at least until someone else comes along and fixes them. What happens when somebody deliberately posts defamatory information libeling somebody else’s good …

A small Internet service provider (ISP) won a default judgment and a hefty $1.6 million in damages after establishing that it was harmed by a campaign of spam emails. The defendant, Better Broadcasting, never responded to the lawsuit or appeared in court to defend itself. Utah-based ZooBuh, Inc., which provides email, chat and blogging services to about 35,000 customers, sued Better Broadcasting in 2011 for allegedly inundating ZooBuh and its users with at least 13,453 unsolicited emails. ZooBuh relied on …

Joining a handful of other states that limit employer access to social media accounts, New Mexico on Apr. 5 passed a law forbidding employers from demanding passwords from prospective employees. Job Applicants Only Under the new law, employers are forbidden from requesting or requiring job applicants to provide access to their social media accounts. “Joining Maryland, Illinois, California, Michigan and Utah, New Mexico is now the sixth state to prohibit employers from mandating access to a job applicant’s password-protected …

Digital music cannot be sold secondhand over the Internet, even if the seller deletes the original file, a federal judge ruled last week. The precedent-setting decision handed down by a district court in New York has implications for other digital goods like books and movies as well. “Courts have not previously addressed whether the unauthorized transfer of a digital music file over the Internet – where only one file exists before and after the transfer – constitutes reproduction within the …